Brooke, Rupert (1887-1915), was an English poet whose career was cut short by his death in World War I (1914-1918). Brooke composed poems about nature and love, but he is best known for 1914, a sequence of patriotic war sonnets published in 1915, after his death. The sonnets expressed the patriotic idealism that was the mood of England during the early years of the war. His most famous war poem is “The Soldier.”
Brooke was one of the most admired of the Georgian poets of the early 1900’s in England. The Georgians wrote idealistic and traditional Romantic poetry about nature and the pleasures of rural living. Brooke’s death became symbolic of the death of Georgian poetry.
Brooke was born on Aug. 3, 1887, in Rugby, near Coventry. He traveled in North America, Europe, and the South Pacific in 1913 and 1914. Brooke enlisted in the army shortly after war broke out. He died of blood poisoning on the Greek island of Skiros on April 23, 1915.
See also Soldier, The.
